


Chalk Dust & Lilies

by Louffox



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Fae & Fairies, M/M, Magic Zolf!, Slow Burn, Some sort of magician AU, Zolf centric but the whole gang's here, but it's not vital, if you've read the bartimaeus trilogy it will help, pentagrams and old timey magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:33:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22133338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Louffox/pseuds/Louffox
Summary: Zolf is a magician just trying to fix the world and the weather. He gets his hands on an old text that might be describing an entity that can help him- if he's translated it right.If he's wrong, what he summons will probably destroy him or consume him, but he's never been able to walk away from a high stakes challenge.
Relationships: Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	1. The Double Solomon's Seal

**Author's Note:**

> The magic and spellwork in this book has nothing at all to do with pathfinder or DnD. It's based on this book series called The Bartimaeus Trilogy, which I absolutely recommend to any and all audiences, but you don't need to have read it to read this.
> 
> This will mainly focus on Zolf and Wilde, but may have a few other appearances, if I can work them in.
> 
> Rated Mature for language and suggestive themes, but I don't expect it to go up or go beyond that. (There are themes that can go much further, but if I go into that, I'll probably put it as a part of a collection with this, so as to keep this friendly to more folx.)

Zolf was up late.

This was not unusual. His light being on late was usually a facet of the night, as much as the stars and moon and distant glow from the city. His best work was done at night- the rays of the sun were poison to his magic, the destruction of UV light weakening the power and making him have to work twice as hard.

And with the storms- well. Daylight was a rare thing anyways, so may as well work at night. The sky was always so black from thunderheads and boiling clouds. At night it tended to be less raucous, a steady rain instead of wind and thunder. He didn’t sleep much, except when his body decided enough was enough and he finally tanked, at the table or his desk or sometimes right on the floor in a chalk circle, and he remained unconscious for a dozen hours or so.

It had been dark for a while yet, and he’d had a productive night. Now he was just pouring over an old text. Sasha and Cel had brought it back from a raid on some alchemist who’d taken over a university, and they’d scoured his library for anything odd. This one had been locked up in a hidden panel in the floor beneath a rug, beneath a desk. He’d taken to examining it at the end of every night, hoping a fresh take and perhaps enough exposure would give him some insight. It was written in some mongrel of a language, a mix of latin and ancient greek, with a dash of hebrew. It read like- well, like someone was trying to write in daedric, but only had heard it and had never seen it written. Which was probably the case. These things weren’t always an exact art. Fortunately, that was how Zolf preferred it.

He’d never been capable of walking away from a challenge or a mystery.

The book was implying something about deep ocean currents, weather above correlated with weather below. The motion of the sky bound to the motion of the deep. It was all about vast energy and movement. There was a word that might mean guardian. Or watcher. Or playwright. Contextually, that last one was unlikely, but Zolf had seen some weird shit in his time. Who knew, maybe the storms were related to a playwright. He wouldn’t bet against it.

He chewed his thumbnail thoughtfully. If he had more, he could scry the guardian. Just take a peek. That way, so long as it wasn’t a deity or a gorgon, he would be fine. But he was missing enough details to cast a good Look, without manually scanning every body of water on the planet.

However. There was enough in the book that he could easily put together a summoning. That wasn’t really ideal, considering how he didn’t even know what exactly it was yet. A summoning only required a title and the correct intent, but he would have to take a lot of precautions. Blindly summoning unknown entities was risky. Ask Edison- though you’d need to do a bit of necromancy if you wanted to talk to him.

Curie had wanted something solid within a fortnight of his last meeting with her. That had been eleven days ago.

The book had given him a bit more about this guardian. It was using a word he wasn’t at all familiar with. He wasn’t sure if it was a name or a title. Gancanagh. It detailed that it’s touch was… freedom? Whoever had written this deserved a trident up the arse for taking such a vague poetic tone. It read beautifully, but was damn near useless for giving up any usable information.

Maybe he could modify the spell. Or just wrap it in enough layers of protection and binding to be safe. Maybe he could trap it. Or something. He looked over at his circles. His pentacle was cold and white. He’d done hardly a thing all night.

It was high risk.

But perhaps it would be high reward as well? He smoothed his beard. What was the worst that could happen? He summoned something that overwhelmed his pentacles and wards and it destroyed him or consumed him. What was the best that could happen? He could speak to a weather being that could tell him what was going on and how to stop it.

He’d always been good at sea creatures. And if he was consumed- then he spent the rest of eternity in the sea. That was alright by him.

He picked up his chalk and went to work.

Twelve candles of beeswax and a thread of his own hair braided into each wick were placed and lit. He set out a few chips of agate and a pearl at each point of his double-hexagram. Agate was a good silica for binding, pearls for containment, and the hexagram was his preferred pentacle shape. Most magicians he knew stuck with the traditional five pointed pentagram, but five disagreed with him. Six was good, an even number, lots of divisors, and if it was good enough for Solomon, it was good enough for him. Doubled was even better- twelve was a powerfully flexible number. It gave him more room to adapt and shift as needed, as opposed to the rigid structure of a pentagram.

Within the hexagram sat a line of seal bones carefully arranged from smallest to largest. This was just covering his ass- he’d sketched runes to secure, contain, and protect the entity, which forbade it from bringing along a body that was too large for the pentacle. If it couldn’t do that, then it could inhabit the bones. Each bone had a scorched glyph for calmness. He had a Ptomley knot on the floor between his circle and the hexagram, that he could turn to form a bridge if he needed to approach or pass something between them. He held his favorite ice pick in his left hand and the book in his right. His shoes were rubber soled to keep from conducting anything unwittingly. On his hip was an ancient summoning horn given to him from Hamid’s hoard. If need be, he could break it, which would dispel anything short of a titan. It would be a terrible waste of such a powerful artefact, but it would be pretty useless to him if he died.

He was pleased as punch with the setup. He’d taken every precaution he knew. Everything was ready for the guardian. The gancanagh. 

Taking two deep, slow, controlled breaths, he looked at the book, scanning over the summoning one last time, and then began to read. At the second to last syllable, he set the ice pick in the center of the book and closed it around the blade.

It was done.

He waited.

...and waited.

...

This was irritating.

..

.

Now it was just plain rude. It had been nearly ten minutes. He studied the bones carefully- they were undisturbed. Entities occasionally appeared invisibly and stayed hidden from sight in an attempt to trick the summoner into exiting the circle, thinking it had failed. But he’d seen the candle flames flare, felt the energy lost to the magic. The summoning had taken.

The guardian was just… taking its sweet time.

Finally, he could smell something. The being was arriving.

It smelled of tobacco smoke, bone dust, and something else. Something flowery and fragrant. Sweet. Zolf scoured his memory. It was something specific and recognizable. Springtime and melted snow.

Zolf’s mouth drew into a frown. This did not bode well. Would a deep ocean guardian creature smell of tobacco smoke, bone dust, and… lilies? That’s what the flower he smelled was. Lilies.

Between blinks, the pentacle was empty, and then it wasn’t.

The bones remained on the ground. It had brought its own body.

Zolf was a practiced magician. He’d been doing this for decades. His eyes still went a bit wide at what appeared.

It was probably not a deep sea guardian.

The gancanagh had the form of a man. It was tall- six feet or more, by Zolf’s reckoning, and its most notable characteristic its clothes, followed closely by its hair. The thing had a peacock blue suit on. Bright blue. The layer beneath- a waistcoat?- was striped white and orange, and a tie of the same orange color.

Its hair was a rich, dark, oaky color, going nearly to its shoulders, and was perfectly curled into loose ringlets.

And then it shifted its weight, crossed one ankle over the other (revealing more orange, socks- why did it have  _ socks _ ) and smiled at him.

“Hello there,” it said.

“You’re… the guardian?” Zolf said stupidly.

It laughed at him. Yeah, alright. He’d done goofed this one right up. He deserved that.

“No.”

Zolf spoke four syllables, twisting his hand in a gesture with two fingers lifted, seized the ice pick, and pulled it from the book. The air snapped, and the creature was gone. He was smart enough to know better than to play around with unknown entities. He’d tried to summon a guardian of vast ocean and sky. He’d summoned something else. He didn’t know what it was, so he ended it right then. Fussing around with unknowns was a good way to get killed.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he snarled, kicking over a candle and smothering all the flames with a slashing gesture of magic. All that work for nothing.

When he went to bed that night, irritated and still not confident about his translations even after redoing it all a fifth time, he could still smell lilies and smoke.

The scent remained for days.

Zolf found something for Curie. Not in that book. A different one. It was about reading the language of the wind in the pattern of the birds. She took it to Hamid and his brood to examine the skies with, and told Zolf she would have work for him soon. Until then, he was left to his own devices.

He used the visit to raid her library of etymology texts, and went trying to figure out what gancanagh meant, if not guardian.

Worryingly, he found a reference to it eventually- but not from one of her encyclopedias or etymology books. It was in a book he’d borrowed for his reading pleasure. It was a book about romantic poems around the world, and quoted one Irish poem. The line was short. “ _ I can resist anything except temptation”, the gancanagh sighed into the air we shared. I could not reply, for this was the love that dare not speak its name, and I was mute in empathy, for I understood it too perfectly to bear. _ It was written by a Hector D’Estrange. Further research into D’Estrange revealed they were a woman, posing as a man, who had been arrested and sentenced to death in some ancient disgusting display of bigotry. Zolf could find no more of D’Estrange’s writings or any more references to them. He couldn’t even find the full poem. 

The smell of lilies was still hanging around. And rather than getting sick of it, he began feeling odd and homesick when he was elsewhere. He caught himself taking deep breaths, seeking the scent of flowers while out at the harbor or the market.

Petitions for books from Ireland were rejected, as the entire northwestern seaboard of Europe was so stormswept as to be cut off from the rest of the world.

  
  


So Zolf did the smart thing. He got absolutely pissed and summoned the entity again.

\-------

A/N: if you google gancanagh, you may be worried that the rating will need to change. DON'T PANIC. I have a plan.

If you have any other worries/concerns, please reach out to me in the comments!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cw for swearing, intoxication, electrical shock, innuendo

The smell of lilies was still hanging around. And rather than getting sick of it, he began feeling odd and homesick when he was elsewhere. He caught himself taking deep breaths, seeking the scent of flowers while out at the harbor or the market

  
Petitions for books from Ireland were rejected, as the entire northwestern seaboard of Europe was so stormswept as to be cut off from the rest of the world.

So Zolf did the smart thing. He got absolutely pissed and summoned the entity again.

This time, it appeared almost immediately, dressed the same, in the same relaxing position it had vanished in the last time. As if the time that had passed for Zolf had not passed for it. Zolf jabbed the air with the ice pick, still with the book hanging from the blade.

“What the hell. kind of game. is this,” he accused, giving it a drunk-sloppy scowl. It raised one brow at him, haughty and elegant, despite being in a frankly ridiculous suit.

“Game?”

“The- that smell! You’re getup! I’ve been hunting for you for  _ ages _ !”

“I’m right here. You could’ve summoned me at any time, no need for hunting-,”

“You- no, you as in- gann-cann-agh! Whateverthingy you are! My house smells like lilies,” he groaned, slapping his hands over his face.

“That’s what you smell? Interesting,” the thing mused. It was suddenly holding a fountain pen and a notebook that it jotted something down in merrily.

“What else would I be smelling? It’s you, innit?”

“Mmm, yes and no.”

“What’s gancanagh mean?”

“Means I smell like lilies, apparently.”

“ _ Why do you smell like lilies?!” _

“Not sure. The thrall?”

Oh, no no no. Zolf knew what  _ that _ word meant. He pointed a commanding finger at it. “No. No. I’m not doing any of that, thanks.”

“Not in the predatory sense. I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“A-  _ what? _ ”

“Why outfight what you can outfuck?” it said with a laugh and a smile, flipping a curl over its shoulder. “Blood isn’t the what I want, there are other bodily fluids more to my taste, like s-”

Zolf cut it off with the first syllable of the dispelling and a gesture, but then paused. He sighed massively, irritated at it. At himself.

“What would you expect me to smell?” he asked.

“Smoke, or nothing at all.”

“I smell smoke too. But that don’t stick round.”

“Fascinating.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well. Normally I would expect that means you’re already a thrall, but you’ve not even had a touch yet,” the thing mused. It was clearly enjoying itself.

“Had a touch? Touch of what?”

It beamed at him, showing white teeth, mirth, and a raw joviality Zolf had never seen in a summoned being before.

“Me.”

Zolf dispelled it then, because that would be the point in a horror story when the thing sprouted razor claws and lunged for him, and he wasn't about to fall to that cliche. And because he'd left his scotch outside his circle and wasn't about to leave mid-summoning for his glass of booze.

The book about the gancanagh sat untouched in a pile of shells and half made dreamcatchers for three weeks. The rest of his cabin was untouched as well. He’d been summoned by Curie, and then sent on a hit and run mission with Grizzop, Tjelvar, and Cel. Cel and Tjelvar had put together something to take on the turbulent oceans by slipping through beneath the surface. A submarine. Grizzop was part of the team as well, and he needed to go along because the ocean was his specialty. And though Grizzop could lay on hands with the best of them, Zolf was still a good backup to bring along. It was a good thing too. His ability to throw off curses to the mind was dead useful against the weird oceanic defenses around the elemental factory they were crashing.

But also. Submarines. Small spaces. It wasn’t exactly a fun pulpy time.

(Tjelvar wasn't actually all bad. Grizzop was usually someone Zolf appreciated working with, but trapped in close quarters with him for a long span of time revealed their friendship had limits. Cel kept them all sane with potions of miniaturization, deafness, and something they called 'vitamins' that kept them from getting sick from lack of sun.)

He summoned the gancanagh again a few nights after getting home. He was feeling good- their mission had been a success, they'd found the elemental cage manufacturing power plant and destroyed it- and thinking maybe he could take another crack at this. He'd solved some good stuff lately, maybe he could keep the momentum going.

And the elementals had given him an idea.

"What- I’m here again?” the thing mused, looking around with a small pout.

“Me again. Just looking for some answers is all. Could you please tell me what a gancanagh is?”

“Mmm, and what am I going to get out of it? Information is valuable, you know. It’s not free.”

“See that?” Zolf said merrily, pointing at the floor. The entity looked down, bit its lip, and procured some glasses from a pocket. Zolf rolled his eyes and spoke a word, flexing his magic.

The gancanagh yelped as it received a low-grade Spark. “That is  _ rude _ ,” it growled, smoothing its suit.

“I added Monroe’s pentacle to your circle. For a little bit of inspiration. Motivation.”

“Castigation,” it grumbled. Zolf spoke a string of quantic values and it winced, but didn’t receive a shock.

“I’ve set it to automatically shock you upon utterance of an untruth,” he told it. “What’s a gancanagh?”

“Me.”

“What are you?”

“A gancanagh.”

Zolf frowned. He tried again. “You are a gancanagh. What does that mean?”

“Means me.” It took a shock and rapidly added, “Oscar.”

“Oscar?”

“I’m Oscar. Wilde.”

“You’re… wild.”

“My name, fool. Oscar Wilde.”

“Great. That’s…” Zolf checked an imaginary watch. “A load of wasted time for a useless name. What is Oscar Wilde, then? A gancanagh, yes, give me more than that.”

“An absolute delight,” it sait with a lewd wink.

Zolf dispelled him, his good mood ruined.

**Author's Note:**

> scream at me on the discord or yell in the comments if you've got any concerns, questions, critique, etc.


End file.
